Tuesday, July 26, 2016

The road to a national vote on a new constitution took an unexpected turn in northern Thailand on Sunday, when 100 pig-tailed macaques reportedly stormed into a voting station and destroyed a section of the voter rolls and other documents.

The marauding macaques swarmed into an open hall of the Wat Hat Mun Krabue temple in Pichit Province, about 220 miles north of Bangkok, that will be used as a voting station in less than two weeks. A police investigator and village chief who inspected the site found a third of the voters list had been left in tatters, along with a large chunk of the posted instructions for voters.

It's not clear what might have set the primates on a path of destruction; The Bangkok Post reports that witnesses who tried to catch the monkeys failed to apprehend them. The newspaper adds, "They said the monkeys which were responsible for the damage live in the bushes around the temple."